…he just went out, Jimmy!…

…the French call it ‘elevator humour’… the knack of finding in an instant the reactive knockout punchlines for a particular situation… no better champion of the art was my lifelong hero, Sir Winston Churchill, whose retorts are the stuff of legend, in and out of Parliament… one of his lesser-known bounce-back-verbal-bombs was directed in the 1920s at Sir Wilfred Paling, M.P., a much older member of parliament, and Churchill’s opposite number at the time in the House of Commons… during a debate, it was apparent to all listening that the young Churchill was getting by far the upper hand in the exchanges in the chamber… in exasperation, Paling called Churchill ‘a Dirty Dog’, to which our hero’s immediate riposte was, ‘yes, and we know what Dirty Dogs do to Palings, don’t we’… (for non-Brits, ‘palings’ are the vertical rods or wooden straps on a fence)… about forty years ago, one Saturday morning, just after the bar’s licensed opening time of 11.00 a.m., a pal and I were nursing a ‘recuperative’ pint in a pub in Oban…

…the front double-swing doors opened directly to the long bar… to the left and right inside the door, were benches and tables, at one of which, yours truly and my mate-in-recovery, a Scots lad by the name of Ronnie, were the only people in the place apart from the bartender…

…as the first customers, we had barely supped the foam from the lager glasses when the door swung open… an agitated gentleman stuck his head in and looked to the left and the right, obviously expecting to see someone other than Ronnie and I… with glass in hand, almost at his lips, Ronnie looked over the rim of his drink and said, ‘he just went out, Jimmy!’… ’Jimmy’ being the catch-all mode of address for most males in Scotland… the man said ’thanks’ and disappeared back out of the pub… I was astounded, because no-one had come in or out while we had been there… I asked Ronnie, ‘who went out?’… he replied… ‘och, naeb’dy, but he was obviously looking for SUMB’DY, and I didn’t want to disappoint him’… Churchill would’ve been proud of my mate, Ronnie… see yeez later…  LUV YEEZ!…

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